Paper short abstract:

Focusing on state-outsourced emergency shelters for asylum seekers in France, I explore their (im)material conditions to understand current modalities of state presence and power. I suggest that the model of outsourced shelters allows for state ambiguity and contradiction in the business of asylum.

Paper long abstract:

Much scholarship on (im)material bordering infrastructures as diverse as detention centres (De Genoa and Peutz 2010), naturalization ceremonies (Mahzouz 2017) and job counselling for migrants (Del Percio 2017) has productively demonstrated the state to be incoherent and non-unitary, often fluctuating between presence and absence. Some have pointed to the embroilment of non-governmental players within processes and sites of bordering (e.g. Ticktin 2011). Yet few have examined the increasingly prevalent model of states outsourcing bordering infrastructures to non-governmental "operators."

My paper explores the French state's recent moves to outsource the social work of sheltering asylum seekers to non-governmental "operators," in a context of welfare-state dismantlement. In responding to state published "calls for tenders," non-governmental organizations with missions of social support vie to enter "markets" of social work structured by precepts of efficiency, austerity and competition.

Focusing on two outsourced emergency shelters for asylum seekers in France, I ask: what do the material and immaterial conditions of such shelters tell us about current modalities of state presence and power? Examining the overexploitation of saturated shelters and the ever-changing rules of operation and occupancy as operators negotiate access to rights and resources for problematic "Others," I suggest that the model of outsourced social work allows for state ambiguity and contradiction in the business of asylum. Pulled between their contractual relationship with the state and their social support mission, tail-end operators of the outsourcing state work by virtue of constant exceptions, leaving the rules—and borders of the nation-state—unchallenged.